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More on the Marriage and Family Purge at the Vatican

by Christopher A. Ferrara
August 22, 2016

When Sister Lucia warned Cardinal Caffarra in the 1990s that “the final battle between the Lord and the reign of Satan will be about marriage and the family,” she did not reveal the particular reality unfolding now: a relentless drive by Church leaders to loosen the Church’s constant teaching on the impossibility of Holy Communion for public adulterers (the divorced and “remarried”) and cohabiters who refuse to abandon their illicit sexual relations, spearheaded by a Pope with a divorced and “remarried” sister and cohabiting nephew.

The just-announced reorganization of the Vatican’s marriage and family departments, the subject of my last column, is quite clearly a tactic in this “final battle.” My last column mentioned that Italian Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, who is now the president of the soon-to-be abolished Pontifical Council for the Family, has been made president of Pontifical Academy for Life, while the new Dicastery for the Laity, Family, and Life will be headed by Dallas Bishop Kevin Farrell. As my last column noted, both prelates are “gay-friendly” and Paglia openly advocates Holy Communion for unrepentant public adulterers.

Other facts pertaining to this “marriage and family purge” at the Vatican confirm the reality of an absolutely stupefying attack on sexual morality from the very vertices of the Church. It was Paglia who, as head of the Pontifical Council for the Family, approved the first Vatican-issued “sex-ed” program in Church history, replete with indecent images and even recommendations that young people watch sexually explicit movies. Life Site News provides this executive summary of this horrific program, which blatantly violates the Church’s constant teaching against any form of explicit classroom “sex-education”:

• Handing the sexual formation of children over to educators while leaving parents out of the equation.

• Failing to name and condemn sexual behaviors, such as fornication, prostitution, adultery, contracepted-sex, homosexual activity, and masturbation, as objectively sinful actions that destroy charity in the heart and turn one away from God.

• Failing to warn youths about the possibility of eternal separation from God (damnation) for committing grave sexual sins. Hell is not mentioned once.

• Failing to distinguish between mortal and venial sin.

• Failing to speak about the 6th and 9th commandments, or any other commandment.

• Failing to teach about the sacrament of confession as a way of restoring relationship with God after committing grave sin.

• Not mentioning a healthy sense of shame when it comes to the body and sexuality.

• Using gay icon Elton John (while not mentioning his activism) as an example of a gifted and famous person.

• Endorsing the “dating” paradigm as a step towards marriage.

• Not stressing celibacy as the supreme form of self-giving that constitutes the very meaning of human sexuality.

• Failing to mention Christ’s teaching on marriage.

• Treating sexuality as a separate subject instead of as something integrated into the doctrinal and moral teachings of the Church.
Indeed, as Life Site observes, this program “violates norms previously promulgated by the very same pontifical council.”

But it gets worse. Francis has not only (as my previous column noted) made Paglia the grand chancellor of the Pontifical Pope John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family, he has also removed Monsignor Livio Melina, 64, as its President, replacing him with the liberal Monsignor Pierangelo Sequeri. It was Melina who, as Life Site points out, “defended the Church’s perennial teaching that remarried divorcees who are not living as ‘brother and sister’ are not to be admitted to Holy Communion.” Melina also bravely insisted that the disastrous Amoris Laetitia “does not change the Church’s discipline” and that “after Amoris Laetitia it continues to be the case that admitting to communion the divorced and ‘remarried,’ (apart from the situations foreseen by Familiaris Consortio 84 and Sacramentum Caritatis 29) goes against the Church’s discipline.”

Thus it is no surprise that Melina’s head has rolled in the marriage and family purge Francis is clearly conducting.
It is no use denying reality: We are in the midst of an apocalyptic turn of events in the Church. After fifty years of reckless innovation in the name of Vatican II, now even the fundamental precepts of the natural law concerning marriage and sexual morality are under attack from within.

Faced with this reality, we must, as always, look to Our Lady in the midst of the tempests that have assailed the Church from her beginning, this one being the greatest of all. For as Sister Lucia also wrote to Cardinal Caffarra (a member of the conservative opposition at the “Synod on the Family”) in light of the Third Secret whose prophecies are now being fulfilled: “Don’t be afraid because anyone who works for the sanctity of marriage and the family will always be fought and opposed in every way, because this is the decisive issue. However, Our Lady has already crushed it’s [the serpent’s] head.”

God will not be mocked. Sooner or later He will bring this madness to an end, no doubt through the extraordinary mediation of His most holy Mother in keeping with the Message of Fatima, the prophecy for our time. Our Lady of Fatima, pray for us!